Strategic-alliance

The book has some excellent articles, offering invaluable prescriptive insights for those of us mired in the world of interorganizational alliance relationships. While the book is flavored to address the needs of businesses, the insights imparted can easily be adapted for any alliance. Different authors from across the world have contributed to this book, thereby smoothly blending in international and cultural points-of-view. Worth reading.

Undoubtedly one of the best business books ever written about alliances and outsourcing. The author interestingly portray the motivation behind alliances and outsourcing. He mentioned that "Too often, an alliance is seen as a way of "plugging a gap" or "covering a weakness" rather than exploiting a strength." He also explain what key success factors needed to ensure long-term competitiveness of the organization. An enjoyable and excellent book to read. Recommended reading for people involved with Alliances and Outsourcing.

A great read for anyone looking at setting up replenishment across geographically spread sites. While most texts provide information on centralised warehousing supplying stores or plants, this book focusses on transferring stock from multiple locations. Great for today's internet retailing world !

"Beyond Teams" is an excellent reference for anyone interested in charting or changing results in their collaborative networks. From the standpoint of anyone involved in Organizational Behavior/Organizational Development, from manager, practitioner, academic, consultant or team member, this book provides many useful insights and has the feel of actual fieldwork used in its writing. The book is laid out in such a manner that it can be applied in any given situation. The ten guiding principles are structured and repeated in various collaborative work settings consistently. This allows the reader to apply the principles in their unique setting. The ten guiding principles are then explained for each general situation with a short description given for when the principles are not working and, more importantly, when they are working. Too often in this field books are written from a purely academic viewpoint or "this is how you fix it" approach. This book is different in that you can sense the fieldwork in the research and you see how things are supposed to work as well as when they are not working. This gives the reader the option of working on a group's deficiencies while complementing their achievements. This book is a "must have" for anyone interested in improving team communications.

This book gives a thorough insight into how relationships between companies work and how they either sustain or break down. It also breaks the myth of differences in relationships between Japan and 'the West', as the book indicates that relationship in the three continents work quite the same. Quite a new proposition, I think!

The insights of this book will give managers a tool for how they can build successful relationships and how they can improve it. Also students will benefit from this book, as it combines theory and practise in an easy manner. A 'have to read' for anyone who wants to build business relationships that go beyond contracts.

Japanese manufacturers are less vertically integrated than their American or European counterparts. They tend to be smaller and more specialized. For example, Toyota outsources about 75% of components; in the US only Chrysler reaches this degree. But Japanese firms don¡¯t organize the vertical chain through arm¡¯s length transaction. Instead, they rely on a web of long-term, informal relationships between firms up and down the vertical chain. Unlike the
hostile relationships many American and European firms have with subcontractors, in Japan, these relationships involve a much higher degree of cooperation and delegation of a more sophisticated set of responsibilities to subcontractor. This kind of relationship is cited as an excellent example of the trust-based interfirm networks which substantially reduce the transaction cost involved in transactions along the value chain, and is known as the vertical keiretsu.
Such interfirm networks have persisted since the Meiji period, and were constructed in an effort to reduce the uncertainty engendered by market fluctuation. If it¡¯s not the commodified items, frequent switching of subcontractor could result in instability in the quality and quantity of it. With trust-based long-term relationship, they could expect timely delivery, quality control, and stable supply. But this trust-based long-term relationship introduced the rigidity and inflexibility to cope with the dramatic shifts in the environment. The first oil crisis posed a serious threat to the viability of Japanese firms. Cut-throat competition over shrunken international market drove the Japanese firms to enhance competitiveness in all front from cost, quality and the lead time. In doing so, they changed the dynamics of the networks. What they introduced is the subject of this book, in the words of the author, ¡®competitive-cum-cooperation governance, in short, CCC governance. The author deals with the interfirm governance in Japanese semiconductor industry, in particular. But the findings could be applied to other industries like auto, electronics.
CCC governance was developed to introduce the uncertainty in the vertical chain to create market-like effect. While maintaining cooperative links, semiconductor manufacturers imposed several competition-generating measures: strategic pricing, multiple sourcing, and altering procurement sourcing. In strategic pricing, interacting companies cooperatively developed a schedule for reducing prices. In multiple sourcing, semiconductor companies purchased the same parts and materials from multiple sources, so that competition took place among them. While awarding stable cash flows to subcontractors, semiconductor manufacturers could secure the continuous improvement of price and quality. According to data the author provides, the prices were much lower than the spot market transactions. In the words of the author, With CCC governance the Japanese semiconductor firms secured both the allocative efficiency which is the feature of market governance, and the non-allocative efficiency which is the feature of hierarchical governance.
Now you might ask ¡®Is there any reason to coin another neologism? There is already the mountain of seemingly different words which actually have one and the same reference.¡¯ Maybe. The vertical keiretsu could cover the same phenomenon. But author¡¯s intention lies in demonstrating the feature of network which has both cooperation and competition while securing the competitiveness. I think author persuasively illustrates it. And better, he does so not with case study which is hard to represent the population, but with the survey technique. This feature, however, is the weakness at the same time. The author succeeds in drawing out overall picture of the industry. But it lacks the rich depth of the usual business case studies. This makes the book somewhat dry. But I think it worth reading, if you are interested in the Japanese business.

Christian Lechner gives a great overview about the relationship of strategy and networking, but he also works on concrete examples. It is the best book to buy, if you want to know something about strategic networks.

Author Jordan D. Lewis uses the experiences of four major companies - Motorola, Philips Consumer Electronics Company, Marks & Spencer and Chrysler - to show the benefits of creating an alliance with your suppliers. The book, which is thorough and complete, if a bit long-winded, explains the benefits of such customer-supplier alliances, shows how to get started if you want to form a partnership and spells out how to maintain the relationship. The obligatory tables and figures are conveniently listed right after the table of contents. If you are in a huge rush, you can skip the book and just read the tables, because you will probably get a condensed version of the same information. But we at getAbstract think you'll enjoy reading how these four companies fumbled through the awkward initial stages of customer-supplier alliances and then emerged into trend-setting, money-making success.

Davis and Spekman have written an excellent work that that takes two critical points of departure from traditional supply chain management (SCM) literature. First, Davis and Spekman link SCM with strategy, indicating that SCM (or any form of functional excellence) must be valued for its usefulness as a source of competitive advantage - not as an end in itself.

Second, and more importantly, Davis and Spekman emphasize the importance (and challenge) of true collaboration across enterprise boundaries. While supply chain integration is usually treated as a primarily a matter of gaining visibility or improving synchronization throughout a chain (ie, linking IT systems), Davis and Spekman show that true collaboration depends the integration of business processes and the creation of trust outside traditional enterprise barriers. In short, Davis and Spekman have elevated trust to the level of an absolutely necessary condition for true collaboration in the context of SCM.

Davis's and Spekman's message comes none too soon for companies that have been been burned by ERP or CRM system implementations that have failed to produce results or recover costs, or partnerships that dissolve in frustration. Even when the IT or business process aspects of such implementations are handled flawlessly, ignoring the "softer" side - i.e, failing to build trans-enterprise trust - produces predictable results and destroys shareholder value.

As a consultant dealing with issues surrounding SCM and external coordination, I recommend this book to executives, general managers, and other consultants whose clients struggle to integrate and collaborate across enterprise boundaries.

Yet another fine book out of the HBS stable. Badarraco uses case study and analysis to offer another study on the importance of knowledge in the business landscape. There have long been corporate interdepencies--product, service, etc--and in this information age knowledge sharing and alliances will increasingly be the lifeblood of companies. Companies must sustain and build upon their competitive advantages--read this book to find yet another way.